As the amount of collaboration taking place on the Internet continues to rise, it becomes increasingly difficult but more important to be confident that the author of a particular submission is the actual author and not somebody else. It is also important to be able to identify situations in which two separate contributors are actually the same person.
Currently, search engines typically allow searches concerning a particular subject. However, such search engines allow for neither correlation of results over the results of several engines nor correlation of results over time. Some research projects involving correlations between content authored in multiple venues have been conducted, such as a University of Texas study that attempted to correlate Netflix users with IMDb review contributors in an attempt to de-anonymize the users. However, such correlation engines are not available for general purpose use on a data set of a user's choosing. Also, they do not provide the kind of results that would be easy for a novice user to understand.